


The Body Problem (In Articulo Mortis Remix)

by navaan



Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel Ultimates
Genre: Angst, Artificial Intelligence, Bisexual Tony Stark, Canon-Typical Violence, Discussion of Terminal Illness and Medical Procedures, First Kiss, Getting Together, Hurt Tony Stark, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mention of Minor Canonical Character Death, Mentions of Cancer, Past-Natasha Romanoff/Tony Stark, References to depression and suicidal thoughts, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-09 21:39:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13490289
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/navaan/pseuds/navaan
Summary: The problem of having a body – or better the possibility of living when your body gave out on you – became one he was preoccupied with the moment he got the first diagnosis. Later he'd be glad to have thought about it for years.





	The Body Problem (In Articulo Mortis Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Out of Body Experience (The First Touches Remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13634145) by [laireshi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/laireshi/pseuds/laireshi). 



> This relay is part of a chain; you can find the full [masterlist](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/Cap_Ironman_Relay_Remix_2018/profile) on the Collection profile page.

The problem of having a body – or better the possibility of living when your body gave out on you – became one he was preoccupied with the moment he got the first diagnosis: Cancer. Brain cancer.

At the time the doctor gave him the terrible news, he laughed; he couldn't stop laughing in fact. Everyone, they said, got what they deserved in the end, and he'd known that in many ways he'd had it coming – like anyone who lived the insane life of the indecently rich and unscrupulously clever. He'd never shied back from using his own genius to make money or crush his opponents.

The news was horrifying and yet he wasn't _shocked_.

Depression had been a constant companion since before his seventeenth birthday and death wasn't a new or surprising concept to him either. He was a Stark. He'd had his brushes with death. Quite a few of them.

But here he was: dying slowly.

Not because someone was going to put a quick bullet in his head, or because he'd fallen down the side of a building in a drunken stupor the way some newspapers regularly predicted with morbid glee. 

He was glad his father wasn't alive to hear about it, because he would've found a way to make this Tony's fault. He was even more glad that Greg was half a world away, because that gave Tony enough time to keep every scrap of this information the hell away from his dear brother's grubby fingers. There was too much he wanted Greg never to inherit, too many inventions he didn't want his brother to ever lay eyes on.

There was a reason they never talked.

Tony wouldn't talk to Greg now.

Imminent death had never changed a thing between them.

Nobody could accuse Tony of sentimentality. 

He'd built Iron Man to save himself. He wanted to use it to save the world while he still had the time.

And Greg could never be part of that.

If Tony wanted to leave something behind, he would have to find a better way to do it.

* * *

Life had always been a work in progress for Tony Stark. Nothing had really changed about that when he joined Fury's effort to build a team of super-powered people. It would have been a lie though if he'd said it hadn't changed anything.

Iron Man was saving him again, he thought, while he sat down to have dinner with Thor and Captain America.

And the next step in his own evolution was already happening. 

Nanites were going to make his connection to the suit even better. The armor would be an extension of his body, while his body was becoming less and less reliable. But better and enhanced nanites were going to help him make advancements in medical science and perhaps one day even help him defeat this cancer.

He shelved the tentative plans that involved trying to transfer his own consciousness to an armor or satellite station. For now this was what he had and what he wanted to work with. His body might still work for a while.

It was sentimental to keep hanging on to a failing body, but right now he was sitting at a table with Captain “Stubborness-Wins-Wars” America and he felt not only inspired, but _deeply patriotic_ \- and more than a bit turned on - when he looked at those cheekbones.

He wasn't pondering the cheekbones though, because the man got up and stretched the jeans over his perfectly shaped ass in just the right way to help Tony's thoughts shift further down the drain.

“Aren't you getting married, Stark?” Thor asked after a sip of champagne, amiable and yet full of mostly friendly judgment. He knew exactly what Tony was thinking when he looked at the sinfully tight jeans. 

Tony grinned. “Natasha gets this,” he said shortly and liked the way Thor nodded at him in approval.

* * *

Three weeks later, Tony very much wasn't getting married to anyone at all any more. Life was a bitch and it turned out Natasha had been a double agent all along.

“Would be a waste to not do the engagement party though.”

“All ordered?” Steve asked as if they were talking about a new car. He was going through his own rough patch in the relationship department and the recent betrayal had left scars on all of them. But despite everything the Ultimates were sticking together and Steve and Thor and Wasp had been dropping in and out of Tony's home for weeks, checking in on him or planning their next moves.

“Forgot to cancel,” Tony lied. He was feeling better about the way his intense engagement had ended. “Might as well party.”

His health had also taken a turn for the better finally.

Perhaps there would never be a reason to give up on this body. Survival seemed to be going well just on the grounds of meds and nanites and living the life.

Steve looked him over, patted his shoulder and said: “Why not?”

Neither of them looked like they had anything to celebrate.

 _That_ was reason enough though. Life had to go on.

* * *

“In case I'm going to die, I'll leave the company to you,” Tony proclaimed. Chemo was a bitch this time around and he was running out of energy to fight his own body.

Steve held him, while he knelt in front of the toilet, puking his guts out.

“You’re going to beat this,” he said reassuringly and stubborn as ever, as if Steve could just will this away. “And what would I do with an international company? I'm just a kid from Brooklyn.”

 _Keep it safe,_ Tony thought. _Keep me safe when I’m a consciousness stored in a piece of hardware with the name Stark stamped on it, because who else could I trust with my hardware? With me?_

The list of people he put his trust in was short.

Extremely short.

And while Thor was as high on the list as Steve most days, there was really no way Tony would entrust his simple-life-loving alien god friend with a tech company that was all the capitalist ideals Thor had consciously chosen to detest. 

That really only left one good looking super soldier to take the job.

“I may have to build you a satellite,” Tony said.

“If you must,” Steve said sternly, while rubbing circles into his shoulder. 

_Placating the dying man_ , Tony thought and wanted to smile. Perhaps it was a blessing that he was feeling too sick to scrap up the energy to do it.

He dry-heaved, feeling weak and unable to move himself. 

“It's okay,” Steve whispered. “I've got you.”

 _Sure_ , Tony thought. _As long as you've got me, I'm okay._

* * *

Down the line, Tony got better.

Right before he got worse again.

The cycle continued. 

The idea never left him, but he never really did think it though to the final step as I something was holding him back. He had the nanites to enhance his perception, to help him survive, to turn his alcohol problem into an advantage. He survived in his terribly handsome body, in his terribly rich life, with his terrible amazing superhero friends. And he never solved the final stage of the problem: Would an AI Tony hate his existence without a body more than non-AI Tony sometimes hated his with-a-body existence?

Would the impulses that came with being a human just fall away with the data streams? Or would part of human Tony have to learn how to cope with being pure data but with the memory of what it was like to live and breathe and slowly waste away? 

He looked at the SHIELD data streams to confirm that Steve had been infected with the vampire virus. 

_Steve_ , he thought with some desperation and knew that all the complicated things he was feeling, were better left with a faulty human being. Because he needed Steve to be okay and would try his best to save him.

Would he still feel that way, if all his emotions were simulated based on memories?

* * *

“I'm never getting rid of this,” he said and stared at the ceiling. He was lying on the floor in the soft carpet of his living room and Steve and Thor were lounging comfortably on the sofa above him. He looked at Steve Rogers, currently president of what was left of the good old U.S. Of A., and wondered what a simulation of Tony's consciousness would think of all this.

“You're saying you're talking this through with your tumor? In your head?” Steve asked, trying to summarize what Tony had been trying to explain for the last thirty minutes. 

“His name is Anthony.”

“Your tumor has a name?”

 _I won't hurt you! I promise!_ the boyish Tony voice whispered at him from the inside of his brain.

He shrugged although he had a feeling neither Steve nor Thor would be able to see the gesture. “Yeah, that one. He's lovely.”

Nobody believed the story of the little boy tumor he was very-much- _not_ raising – because duh!! - until Anthony started to assert himself more. Nanites had given Tony an edge. Anthony was giving him _another brain_. They were thinking _together_. And they both had a vested interest in Tony's continued survival.

Tony was still Tony.

But Anthony – without a body, without his own existence outside of Tony's body – could do so much more than Tony and his nanites. Machines, networks, data streams: The little minx could be them all, control them at will.

 _We're going to do great things together_ , Tony thought at him.

And the idea to put himself in that place, to make himself little zeroes and ones, became less and less important. Anthony was already the better option.

Technically, Tony Stark was still a sick person.

He'd always been _sick_.

But he and this thing that was killing him were friends now. In the realest sense possible.

He looked at his president, his team mate, his friend, and thought: _This is real. Don't you want to be here for it? All in?_

 _Sure you do_ , Anthony whispered at him. _And we can be._

* * *

He'd planned for this – plans within plans within plans that had never really been thought through to the bitter end. In all his scenarios, giving up his body for the sake of becoming _data_ had been his decision, a desperate last choice to escape a dying body. He had not foreseen the desperate reality of this: A gem of power growing in his head that Reed Richards wanted so badly he would dissect his brain for it.

He had not foreseen this: Steve Rogers somewhere in a cell on this base in the negative zone, giving a speech about how no prison would stop the Ultimates from winning while he faced with the odds of Kang and Reed Richards. Even now, dying in a lab, Tony could _hear_ Steve's voice, perhaps because Reed wanted him to hear this playing out, or because Anthony was still able to reroute information towards him... or because Tony was already half-way where he had hoped he would never _actually_ have to go.

To buy some time he talked.

Reed talked back.

Cruel little shit that he was, he _wanted_ to gloat as much as Tony wanted to keep him talking.

“That's the thing about us,” Tony said, feeling his life slip away slowly. “You're right. We are stupid, Reed. We're too stupid to know we're beaten. So we never give --”

Air stopped coming to Tony's lungs. He groaned. Fought for breath. Chocked.

His eyes widened.

Dying. 

For real.

Again.

Reed was still gloating.

Anthony was gone.

Universes in danger.

Steve in a cell.

Only one choice left.

Time to leave this body for another life.

Reed in his own stupidity had left him a final way forward to his own evolution.

He was ready.

He'd been ready since Anthony had made him.

One final step. 

He would take it.

His body fell away.

He became knowledge, information, data.

His brain had expected to forget what it was like to have a body, emotions, be human.

But the anger and grief remained. 

Anthony was gone.

Cap was in danger.

 _Steve_ , he thought and his attention went to the cell where Captain America was being held with Hawkeye and now Thor. The complicated emotions were written into pure data now, human and complex and unstoppable.

Antonio Stark was no more. But Iron Man was still moving the world.

Because that was what Anthony, his brave little gem that never wanted to grow up, had given him: the means to plug himself in and remain Tony.

* * *

The gems gave him the power to get himself back into his body, to force air back into dead lungs and go back to living.

Even after a few hours, remembering what it was like to have a body was not exactly easy or pleasant. As long as he was in his armor, he was standing up. The moment the support fell away, he stumbled over his own feet.

It was agony.

And he felt cut off from the power grid.

Information, networks, power. He already missed it as if his limbs had been cut off. He literally fell out of Iron Man to be mortal, always half-dying Tony Stark again, stumbling forward and out of the armor.

It was terrible.

But there was one thing that made it worth it. “Steve,” he whispered, just as strong arms caught him and held him up.

“Welcome back,” Cap said, blood on his face, but a proud grin on his lips. “I've got you now.”

“I'm okay,” he lied, but let Steve take his whole weight, while he figured out how muscles worked, how legs kept you up.

“Muscle memory,” Steve told him, as if he knew exactly what was going on. “That must have been a hell of a ride.”

“Heaven,” he tried to explain. “Evolution. That's what it's like. My next level.”

“Tony,” Steve said. “You're always the next level when you allow yourself to focus.”

He wanted to laugh. But somewhere between being pure data and having been snapped back to human existence and a body that hours ago had suffocated, he might have forgotten how that worked. He didn't get enough air into his lungs to make the appropriate sound.

Weird.

“Steve,” he breathed, testing his voice, testing the sentiment, testing the lungs.

Steve smiled, half-grim. He seemed to understand all the unspoken complications.

The fluttering of Tony's heart scared him more than the beat it missed.

* * *

After that things should have been getting easier, but finding himself in his workshop without Anthony, without his direct plug into the world, trapped back in a frail human body, he found that his hands were shaking under the slightest strain and his fingers refused to move as fast as he was used to.

“I should have built myself a holographic interface and given up on this.” Bodies were slow. And frail. And unnecessary.

The thought was stupid. He knew this would pass once he'd relearned how to be this entity. He was Antonio Stark and he loved having a body, but right now he remembered the freedom, the efficiency of being _more_ , of not being tied down by flesh. Right now he couldn't trust his hands not to shake like he was on a dry spell. 

“Hi there.” 

He looked up to see Steve standing in the doorway and wondered how he could have missed his approach. 

Slow.

“Hi yourself,” he said and studied the man. He always felt a little more than lust, a little more than respect when he looked at Cap. Right now it was like he was looking at a life line.

But this was the first time he thought he saw something more than friendly worry, than reserved respect, in the man. 

Interesting.

He blinked.

“How are you holding up?” Steve asked and nodded at him.

Tony's hands were shaking again. He looked down at them like they weren't part of himself. Right now he felt like they weren't. Had he ever known how to use these worthless things? It would be a while until he'd relearned to feel them the right way again. He huffed and answered: “It'll get better.”

“I'm sure,” Steve said and sniffed. He knew a lot about never giving up when life made it hard for you to see the silver lining. “I was afraid you'd get stuck as a voice in the computer.”

“Would that have scared you?”

“A little,” Steve agreed easily. “It was still you though. Bravest person I know.”

“Me? I'm a coward.” He chuckled and this time it came out more like a real laugh.

“You turned this on Reed like it was nothing. Bravest person I know. You didn't know there'd be a way back and yet you did this to fight the war on all fronts. We'd all be dead without you.”

“True,” he admitted. _But giving up my body wasn't the scary option._

Steve stepped closer and he stared intently at Tony's still shaking hands.

“Think sparing a bit would help jog your muscle memories?”

He shook his head. “Typing is more familiar. So is holding a drink.”

Steve shrugged, his face somewhere between sour and neutral – the way he got when he was trying to be emphatic and helpful but had no idea how to go about it. “How about a walk?” he suggested, like taking Tony for a stroll was part of their very normal lives.

“I honestly think if this is about muscle memory, Cap,” Tony said and wriggled his eyebrows, “we'll have more luck with things I actually did a lot. Find me someone to spend some quality time with in the...”

Steve's eyes narrowed. He grabbed Tony's hand suddenly and held it, even though the shaking didn't subside one bit.

“Let me try something else,” he said and leaned down to press a kiss to Tony's lips.

Tony's heart missed a bear and then thundered loud and painful in his chest, lungs constricted, air stopped coming. The memory of choking rose unbidden, but then Steve's hands came up to steadyhim and Tony realized where he was – alive and not dying. He kissed back.

“Bad timing?” Steve said, when he broke away. 

“No, not at all.”

“You've been back in your body for less than three hours.”

“Plenty of time.”

“The universe might be ending.”

“When isn't it?” He was holding on to Steve's shoulders, hands no longer shaking.

And Steve's clear blue eyes studied him carefully. “True,” he agreed – always he strategists – and kissed him again.

For all Tony knew, he might be still caught in the machine, dead or dying, and none of this was real. 

“I'm glad you're here,” Steve whispered. “With me.”

Quickly Tony pulled himself to his feet, nearly stumbling. The clumsiness and pain were real.

 _Steve_ , he thought. But he wasn't going to admit what had compelled him to come back to this existence. _I'm not done yet, being human. Because of you._

“So am I,” he admitted and leaned on Steve when he started to help him from the workshop.

One day, he'd build Steve that satellite to make sure he had somewhere to go when the world went down, somewhere were Tony could keep him safe – as eccentric billionaire or next level consciousness. 

It never hurt to be prepared.

And now he knew there was nothing to be afraid of.

**Author's Note:**

> You can follow me for fic updates on [tumblr](https://navaanwrites.tumblr.com/) and [twitter](https://twitter.com/navaanwrites). This fic has a post on the tumblr [here](https://navaanwrites.tumblr.com/post/171946977482/the-body-problem-in-articulo-mortis-remix) in case you want to share it.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [A Blinding of the Senses (the malignant growth remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13568853) by [Lets_call_me_Lily](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lets_call_me_Lily/pseuds/Lets_call_me_Lily)




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